David Mccullough, Storyteller

Historian Fills Best-selling Books With Juicy Yarns

May 29, 2005|By JOHN FREEMAN; Special to The Courant

David McCullough loves good stories. And you can see one coming by the look on his face.

When he is about to unload a particularly juicy yarn, America's most popular historian puckers his lips, squints his eye, and sometimes even gives a grunt of appreciation. It's as if he's popped a sweet into his mouth and has begun sucking on it.

Sitting at a large oak table in a library at the Yale Club in midtown Manhattan during a recent interview, the avuncular 71-year-old author has been savoring some favorites from his new book, ``1776'' (Simon & Schuster, $32), for about 30 minutes, and he's just beginning.

``Think about that little fifer boy,'' says McCullough, referring to a 15-year-old who makes a brief appearance in his new book.

``He's going down to the battlefield, and then a soldier walks by with a wound on his neck. In his diary, the boy tells how he asks the man if it hurts. To which he replies, `No it doesn't hurt; matter of fact, soon as I get it tied up I'm going back to fighting.' And the boy says, `I was never afraid thereafter.'''

Courage, intimacy and a certain cinematic flair -- here are the elements that have made McCullough a most unusual phenomenon in American bookselling. In a nation of so-called historical illiterates, he nearly outsells Harry Potter.

McCullough's 1993 biography of President Truman spent 43 weeks on The New York Times best-seller list and sold more than 1 million copies. His 2001 biography of John Adams, who, until McCullough got to him was probably America's most obscure ``founding father,'' sold more than 2 million copies and is being turned into an 11-hour miniseries by Tom Hanks. Both books won the Pulitzer Prize.

McCullough likes overlooked figures, almost forgotten historical events and underappreciated public structures such as the Brooklyn Bridge. As with Simon Schama in Britain, through a combination of TV, radio and print work, he has coaxed Americans into learning about historical events they had long since put away in the mothballs of their childhood educations.

The year 1776, however, is not something many people are fuzzy about. Surely, the biographies of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Jefferson and George Washington cranked out in the past few years of founding-father fever have traveled every road of that year at least twice. If not three times.

Not so, if you ask McCullough.

``Americans go out every Fourth of July and we celebrate July 4, 1776, and the Declaration of Independence,'' he says in a rich booming baritone, recognizable from the voiceovers he did for the film ``Seabiscuit'' and Ken Burns' TV series ``The Civil War.'' ``Well, that's only part of what happened. It's all what happens to these people that I want to give credit to.''

By ``these people,'' McCullough is referring to the soldiers and generals who fought alongside Washington, the 42-year-old Virginian and future president, when he was pulled reluctantly out of a gentleman's retirement to lead an army that didn't even have a name. They were also dangerously short of gunpowder, rifles and sobriety. Some soldiers didn't even have shoes.

You wouldn't have known this, judging by the news arriving in London after the battle of Bunker Hill. In homage to that fact, ``1776'' actually opens in the fall of 1775, with King George III's famous appearance at Parliament, where he proclaimed the Colonies in revolt and iterated the need to put a ``speedy end'' to the disorder.

The book then cycles back to tell the story of three notable events: the siege and recapture of Boston by the Americans, Washington's defeat in New York and then his miraculous comeback in Trenton, when he crossed the Delaware in a hailstorm and outfoxed the formidable Hessian guard to earn a victory against the British Empire, which was, as one historian put it, ``the most powerful and efficient machine for waging war in the world.''

Much of this military history has been told elsewhere, as critics have already noted, but never has it been brought so vividly to life. Culling generously from firsthand accounts, diaries and logbooks, McCullough crafts an intensely visual chronicle of the military battles that signaled the birth of the American Revolution. And he drives home just how many times it could have gone another way.

``When I say I love the admonition of Dickens, to `make me see,' it doesn't just mean seeing how the light falls on that chair,'' says McCullough, pointing at a leather settee next to him, revealing at once the influence of fiction and painting (which he does on the side) upon his work.

``It means to make me understand. I don't want the reader to ever lose sight of the fact that the people they are reading about never had any idea how it would turn out. I want them to suspend their disbelief, and remember that things could have gone another way.''